“What goes through your mind—or what you pay attention to— triggers stress or triggers calmness. And you can learn to have more control over that.”
A LEARNED RESPONSE: Luskin’s research on forgiveness is based on the “simplest kinds of common sense,” the psychologist said. His contribution, Luskin said, has been to make the principles easy to understand through his teaching, speaking, and writing.
[See “Nine Steps to Forgiveness,” p. 56.] The idea of what to do came to me in one of those—I’m not claiming any link with the way Einstein talks about discovering relativity or anything close to that, but you just get a flash.
What was the flash? One, I have more control over my happiness than anything that happened in the past. And that if I wanted to get over something, then I need to live in ways, right now, that make me happier, and not spend much time or interest on the past. The second was that nobody owes me anything—I just got that I wasn’t owed anything by anybody. So those two sim- ple things together are what created the [research] project.
How did you go from applying forgiveness methods to interpersonal relationships, to applying them to political relationships, such as in Northern Ireland, where groups of people have hurt and killed each other? It is always personal. One of things that we found was that
On_the_Web
Read about Fred Luskin’s research atwww.learn ingtoforgive.com. Find information about business train- ing using forgiveness principles atwww.maximize yourtalent.com.
people were getting lost in ... the content of the things that needed to be forgiven. The work that I have done is in say- ing that the “what” really matters less than you think. What matters is the “how.” How are you are dealing with it now? What matters is, do you want to heal yourself now? And if that’s true, then there are certain things that you can follow that will help your healing, and you can attribute the problem to anything you want. And that has saved more people from pain than I can tell you.
No matter what the cause? You don’t want to get lost in the “who” and the “what” and the causes, because there’s a million differences. The question is right now, if you want to heal, here are some things that you can do that will help you suffer less, and will lead you to a more open heart. Those are practices that are not philosophical questions
as to who is at fault. It doesn’t mean that the questions of who is at fault are wrong, just that when you haven’t healed, those questions make healing harder. But if you healed a little, then those questions are very useful.
Can you elaborate? When you’re not rage-filled or filled with self-pity, you can think clearly. And then you can say, “Oh, it’s the result of a 300-year-old war. It’s not just that something bad happened to me. This has been going on forever.” It’s not just that political violence is a terrible thing—of course it’s a terri- ble thing—but there’s a context, and when you’re so con- sumed with your own wounding, you lose the context.
Does your research reveal gender differences with regard to forgiveness? All of the studies have shown that mostly women would show up [to participate in forgiveness training], but once you
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PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF INSTITUTE OF TRANSPERSONAL PSYCHOLOGY